Hologram
by The Book of Jude
Summary: The past as it would've been, if the future had gotten there first. It's a twentieth centuary hologram. [BriarOFC, suggested BriarJulius, Julius-centric]


**A/N: **A very Happy Birthday to dearest **Insane Ophelia**, because it was really bad of me to have forgotten her birthday, I wrote the majority of this in one night. Extra thank yous to **Skye Firebane**, who was so deliciously wondrous with her rapid late night beta'ing of this. Extra notes would be to Raymond Chandler, whose gritty _film noir_ style novels inspired this plot. The usual dedication to my partners in crime, **Kitty Rainbow**, **Blue Yeti**, and again to **Skye Firebane** and** Insane Ophelia**, and also to **Flame Fairy**, because she just rocks. That's everything.

1.

Julius remembered the past; it wasn't that long ago. Things had been different. It still wasn't that long ago—he'd seen the past, playing in grainy black and white and whiffs of cigarette smoke punctuated with gun shots and automobile chases, but that was the past—the glorious memory of the past—and it was different from what he remembered it. He'd seen the past in a paperback novel for sale in a discount box outside a long gone bookstore in downtown Haven.

In the paperback novel, the past was different; the past was cynical—closed, unchanging—bloody. 

But everyone else had forgotten it, what it really was.

2.

If the past had been… it would've been. Something different.

3.

He sat in the smoky office. The window was open, the air was cold, and the cigarette warmed his lungs. It was late November. In the top drawer of his desk there was a gun. He hadn't used it in four weeks. He didn't know whether that was good or not; he supposed that, on the one hand, it was good. He hadn't had any major cases that involved the firing of arms. Then, on the other hand, it was bad; he hadn't had any major cases.

He crushed the remains of the cigarette in the ash tray—the smoke was blown out of the room by a stiff breeze not a few minutes later—and leaned back in his chair; he'd switch the lamp on, in a few minutes, but he already had enough problems without being hounded from up-top by using too much electricity. 

Mog Ruith dropped past the horizon. 

He lit another cigarette and turned the lamp on a few minutes later. In the distance, he could hear people chasing up leads and telephones ringing and other people typing up other people's dictated thoughts.

He didn't like it one bit.

'Root,' Chix Verbil hovered at the door, 'someone on the line for you.'

Julius waited a moment before the end of his cigarette joined the other in the ash try; he let out a plume of smoke. 'Oh?' he said. His eyes danced towards the phone. He quirked a brow. 'Know who it is?'

'I'm not your bloody secretary,' Chix muttered, 'just answer the fucking phone.'

Julius' laughter followed him out of the room. The door shut with a bang: 'Root,' Julius muttered into the receiver.

'Ah,' Briar said on the other line, 'Julius. How are you this fine evening?'

Julius licked the taste of the cigarette from his lips. He lit another. 'Fine,' he barked; he could hear Briar swallowing something. Vermouth.

A laugh. 'You're always fine,' Briar said.

'What can I say,' Julius sucked on the cigarette, 'it's my nature to lie about things. Everyone does it.'

Briar laughed and the glass rattled on the table. 'You've got a standing invitation to visit, you know.'

'I know,' Julius said. 

'You've never taken up on it.'

Julius took another breath. 'I know,' he said.

'Emily wants you to visit.'

'No she doesn't.'

'I do.'

'You just want me to fuck you.'

'I want you to visit.'

'No.' Julius poured absinthe into his glass.

'Julius…' Briar's tone was almost warning; pleading; wanting; _please?_; 'Julius, Emily will think something is wrong if you don't come and visit. She might… ask around.'

The glass stopped on it's way to his lips. 'That's blackmail,' he muttered—half heartedly; laughing in his chest; coughing; laughing—'but true.'

'But true,' Briar echoed. 'Come tonight.' He hung up before Julius could say otherwise.

Julius leant back in the chair; the night echoed. He was glad he'd brought his jacket. It was going to be cold, and that wasn't just the weather.

4.

Dinner was the average dinner; Julius wiped the corner of his mouth with a napkin and Emily lit a cigarette. They drank wine and there wasn't much in the way of conversation. The room was lit with lights and candles and the window was open; it was still cold. Emily smiled and Briar's knife and fork rattled against the plate as he put them and the napkin down. Briar smiled.

'So,' Julius said. When he breathed, the smoke from Emily's cigarette warmed his lungs.

Emily smiled. 'It's nice for you to come to dinner, Julius,' she said, 'we hardly see much of you these days. You're always so busy with work…' She sucked in a breath and let it go before taking a sip of wine. Briar smiled—leered, perhaps—from across the table and Julius' wine glass was empty.

Julius grunted.

'Yes,' Briar echoed, 'always so busy with… work.' He almost snickered on the last word, and caught Julius' eye; Emily didn't notice the exchange and chuckled. What Briar had said seemed like a joke.

The three of them laughed.

But only for a time.

5.

_Briar and Julius had really been born only seven years apart. Julius, of course, was the older; the small village in the eastern part of Ireland was long gone—Julius doesn't remember the name, even now—but the memory, just a slight memory of a smoky home somewhere—__when?_—stays with him.

They joined the LEP… an excerpt from the hypothetical Biography of Julius Root, by E. Wood.

6.

Julius sits in the corner of his office and waits for the phone to ring again. It's morning time. He doesn't remember getting drunk the night before, but his headache is testament to that fact. Briar leaves a note on his bedside table: 'Sorry to dump you like this,' it says, 'but Emily wants me home. We'll have to finish our drinking game sometime. I'll call you. Briar.' It's short and to the point.

Always short and hardly ever to the point: that's Briar.

Briar is slick words and even slicker looks that make the secretaries and the cleaning ladies in the LEP headquarters swoon and curse his wife's name. Julius laughs and wonders what it would be like to have such a simplistic outlook on life. He decides that it wouldn't be much fun, after a while and another cigarette.

The window's closed, because it's raining.

Later, he finds himself walking to the small café in the Eastern District of Haven; he eats his lunch alone—_always alone?_—and says hello to the doorman in his apartment block; he rescues a bottle of vodka from the cabinet and doesn't go back to work that evening. He doesn't remember unplugging the phone the next morning, but Briar stares darkly at him when Julius opens the door the next morning.

'Your telephone is off.' He says, shortly.

'Oh?' Julius asks. He stifles a laugh.

'Something's popped up.' Briar says. 

'Oh.' Julius says.

—Julius laughs and trips over an empty bottle of something that's fallen down from an upper shelf and has a crack down the middle. Briar sighs and waits from him to change—and take some aspirin and try to get the taste of vomit out of his mouth—in the living room; Briar thumbs through some magazine and waits.

The minutes tick by.

'Ju—'

'What?' Julius calls.

'They didn't exactly say what it was, only that it was urgent.'

Julius shrugged, walked out of the bedroom and picked up his keys. 'Well,' he said, 'let's go.'

—he felt comfortable with his gun on him.

7.

The car floats in the middle of the lake and the medical examiner is already getting ready to check the body. They don't know who it is: an older man, possibly a random man. It's weird, and it's pointless.

There are no witnesses.

Julius thinks something is wrong.

8.

_Their friendship continued for quite a while; they both joined the LEP together, and both quickly climbed the ranks. Commander Root was hailed as one of the greatest Commanders on the force. With the arrival of the test case Holly Short, and the Artemis Fowl incidents, however, his reputation lost a lot._

After the tragic events of… further from the Biography of Julius Root, E. Wood.

9.

It's a week later.

It's déjà vu.

It's sitting in his office smoking a cigarette.

It's laughing at some joke on some radio.

It's looking out the window.

It's wondering.

It's thinking.

It's speaking and talking and looking around for a mirror just to make sure that it really exists and that it isn't just a memory—dream—thoughtless piece of someone's mind that got left behind when they moved away.

It's trying to escape.

It's not succeeding.

—_Julius gets drunk again._

10.

The second body was found three weeks later. It was exactly the same. An older man. In a car. Floating in a lake somewhere; what's more cliché is that Briar woke him from his alcohol-induced slumber. The light burned his eyes and he clutched at the pillow for a moment before managing to hold back his headache and the bile rising in his throat.

He almost vomited again, leaning over the body.

Briar rubs his back a little while later, in the car, mutters soothing words…

Julius shudders.

His instinct tells him something is wrong.

But he can't discover what.

He smoked a cigarette to try and calm his nerves.

11.

_Julius wonders if it's really like this…?_

12.

'Serial killer?' Julius asks.

Briar nods. 'Third victim so far. We think so.'

'Ah…' he twirls his drink around with his straw and tries not to remember the mangled sight of the body in the morgue; he doesn't like morgues because they smell of death and antiseptic and it's always déjà vu going into a morgue. One day he thinks that he'll see someone he knows there. One day he'll probably be right. But right now he sits in his office and Briar leans against the desk.

Foaly nods. 'Psychological testing—'

'Quiet, Pony,' Julius says, 'we don't have time to hear your technical analysis. Just give us the results.'

'Basically,' Briar cut in, 'they've all be killed by the one guy.'

'Guy?' Julius asks.

Foaly nods. 'Serial killers are hardly ever female.'

'Ah.' Julius lights a cigarette.

The window is closed because it's cold outside; it rained all of last night and the roads are wet and shiny. He almost slipped on his way to work and curses and licks the blood from where his hand scraped along the rail; he wonders if he could ask the landlord to fix up the stairwell in his apartment, but then his landlord would tell him to use the elevator.

Julius doesn't like elevators.

'All right,' he blows smoke across the room. 'What do we do now?'

13.

It's cold.

He had dinner with Emily and Briar again one night. They discussed the case through dinner and Julius tried not to eat; he couldn't understand how Briar could eat when—_dead bodies flashing past his eyes some mutilated some just dead some strangled each in a different way dead but only slightly from the one before dead dead dead and dying; pink and white and blue and_—'dead?' he asks.

'Julius?' Emily's staring at him; Briar's eating.

He shakes his head to clear it. He takes a sip of wine: '—it's nothing,' just after he's finished the gulp, 'just a little caught up with this case.'

She nods. Understanding. Suspicious; she eyes her husband but he isn't looking at anyone—_what does he see?_ Julius wonders—except at his—bare and empty—plate; someone clears away.

Julius doesn't remember whom.

It's cold when he sits in Briar's office; he tries not to remember what happens next. He always tries not to remember and when he gets home is just a little drunk. By midnight he's asleep in his bed. He wonders if being drunk almost every night is bad for him; drunk?; he isn't drunk. Just melancholic.

In the morning, he succeeds.

He doesn't remember.

14.

Later on, Julius might've sat in a café somewhere in Haven; he might've been older; he might've sipped coffee and not smoked a cigarette because he's given that up ages ago. He might've smoked a cigar but he wouldn't've had any on him; he might've sat and pondered, thinking about the past and what it is and what it is that he remembers compared to what everyone else says about it.

People might've seen him in passing, and known him.

He doesn't know himself.

15.

They find the final body at midnight.

Emily is cold and blue, with a cord tied around her neck.

Julius weeps.

16.

_Is that how it happened?_

it's not how it happened…

_is it_?

17.

'Briar?'

Silence.

'Briar?' again.

'What?' snapped.

'I'm…'

'Don't tell me you're sorry.'

'I'm sorry it had to be her.'

'I said _don't tell me you're sorry_.'

Head hung. 'It's just…'

A laugh. 'Fuck off, Julius.'

Then he's gone.

19.

Julius remembers the—_nagging at the back of his mind_—funeral; it's dark and early in the morning and the rain clouds hover over. He stands next to Briar—_Briar has an umbrella something is wrong?_—and rests his hand on his shoulder and listens to the sighs and the Priest as he performs the rites of passing. The passing from the living into the dead.

Emily burns.

—burns.

Burns.

—burns in a cloud of smoke that wafts their way almost as if it's real before it dissipates with the coming of the rain; it's heavy smoke, it fills his longs for just a second before it's suddenly gone. The wind is swift.

'Briar—' _areyoualive?_ '—are you…?' Julius asks.

Briar grits his teeth, shakes his head, sends tears flying and doesn't respond.

—_clenches his fingers around someone's neck?_—

It tries to dawn on Julius but he just doesn't—_want_—to get it; it's going away—the smoke—and then Mog Ruith is at Zenith before he walks away; Briar is still there when he comes back he doesn't know what's happening doesn't remember can't even think why.

'Briar?' he asks.

Tries not to choke on the tears.

It dawns.

'You…'

There's a laugh and he's laughing; Briar's laughing. 'You…' Julius repeats.

'Yes,' Briar says; when he turns to look at Julius there's madness in his eyes. 'Yes. I killed her. I killed all—'

'All of them?' Julius is reeling.

He doesn't remember getting back in his car and running away and away in the direction of his car and driving home to his apartment; he finds the empty bottle of wine on the floor the next day and he has a headache. This time he remembers; he doesn't want to remember because it drags down on him and all he can see is Emily's face and the newspapers proclaiming his death and.

Going away.

20.

'Was it really like that?' Julius wonders aloud.

He can't remember if it was or not.

He rolled over went back to sleep and dreamt of the past.


End file.
